Prom 71: ORR/ Gardiner *****
Royal Albert Hall, 5th September 2018
“Q: Why can you often find viola players standing outside your front door? A: They can’t find the right key and never know when to come in!” Viola players are the butt of a whole genre of jokes, but Berlioz’s Harold in Italy – sometimes dubbed “the world’s longest viola joke” – is in a category all of its own, a lengthy non-concerto based on Byron’s Childe Harold in which the hero is often silent. How wonderful, then, that Antoine Tamestit had the last laugh in a brilliant all-Berlioz Prom by the period instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
Antoine Tamestit
© BBC | Chris Christodoulou
Read the full review on Bachtrack.